Kimi ni Tod: OK

Ha ha, get it?

Well Kimi ni Todoke was the great white hope for Moe Sucks this season and while it hasn’t actually moved us to disgust (yet) the first episode was singularly uninspiring. It’s easy to guess from the synopsis that show will focus on princess goth being “fixed” by the boring male lead, but the main characters are both so preternaturally nice that it’s difficult to imagine how they’ll squeeze 12 episodes out of Sawako’s thin J-horror gimmick. My guess is a lot of dumb comedies of errors and wussy dithering about explaining feelings to each other, because there isn’t a lot of room for conflicts of personality or romantic rivals as things stand. Either way though Kimi ni Tokode just doesn’t have the chops to take shoujo anywhere it hasn’t been before.

…which is a shame, because the backgrounds are Bakemonogatariesque in their prettiness. Someone took a little time to give them a neat brushwork look and slap an artsy filter on just about everything, and the effect is striking. Definitely a world apart from the flat, ugly highschools that every other damn anime seems to spend half the time sitting around in.

Too bad none of that talent was brought to the character animation. The lovely textures of the show’s sets just make the ultra-generic schoolgirls/boys inhabiting them look even more uninspired and boring. Why bother having nice scenery when you’re just gonna have jerkily animated idiot chraracters flop all over it?

Nice sidemouth. I guess when you’re 2-dimensional your tongue is just a big pink tab that you slide in and out.

At this point it is basically up to Sawako’s punk friends to save the show, but aside from this memorable frame they spend most of the episode trapped in shitty chibi sequences. In any case, Kimi ni Todoke is probably a safe bet if you’re a fan of soppy shojou love stories, but don’t expect any surprises. You won’t be getting anything more than you bargained for.

1st second into this show I saw it and thought, “This is obviously a manga adaption,” and the whole time through, I was basically thinking of how each and every scene would fit into a manga panel. I’ve gotta agree with it seeming very cookie-cutter shoujo, though. Usually each manga will have some sort of event, state of being, or some kind of catch to try and make it un-typical, but I don’t really see one here. Maybe that’ll be a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s at least worth sticking around to find out, I suppose.

I read the second volume of manga the other day, and it is an extremely by-the-book shojou. The only gimmick it has so far is Sawako’s appearance, and not only is that a kind of thin premise but it’s also not really communicated very well. There’s a significant gap in the way she looks when she’s scaring people and when the audience is supposed to be sympathizing with her. I was really hoping the anime would bridge the gap by actually showing the transition that takes place between scary face and pretty face, but they haven’t done it yet. The series is pretty inoffensive but it’s also very bland, I don’t know that they’ll really be able to make 13 eps worth watching out of it.